We are preparing an online event and series of debates around the subject of networks, belgian and east&central european experimental media art and transdisciplinary practices . Our goal is to connect practices and territories, bringing into question different aspects of these processes of cultural production.

We would like you to participate by receiving our audiovisual stream and joining us in the irc chat to discuss and reflect upon the onsite panel. Our chat will be beamed next to the panelists and we hope to find many instances to
interact and contribute to the conversations.

We would like to play with degrees of visibility of both people and information, bringing together a network of subjects and practices. Our moderated chat will count with the presence of informational personalities such as chatbots as an attempt to experiment with mobile mixtures of topics and contexts.

We would be very pleased if you can join us online. All round table discussions and IRC chats are scheduled daily between 3pm and 7pm CET.
Stream and IRC chat can be jointly followed at okno.be/live

okno is interested in the creative and unpredictable innovations that stem from unruly combinations of scientific, mediatic and technologic artefacts: seeds to grow new forms of expression where old structures are
crumbling...
We offer a virtual and physical public forum for reflection on technologically-inspired media arts. We tend to be a physical and online meeting place for artists, and want to facilitate a dialogue on current forms of artistic practice with a creatively engaged audience. We want a form of media art that is digital, collaborative and networked, interactive and realtime, performative and shared, indivisible in its audio-data-visual output.
The cultural and aesthetic influences of media technologies will be critically discussed in the context of an alternative festival setup. The processes and results of artistic research will be presented in a program of round table discussions, performances, experimental concerts, interactive installations and workshops.

-------

May 24, 2006 3pm>5pm
Theme: Beauty in the age of digital art; aesthetic, poetic or rhetoric.

Let's talk about aesthetics. In many contemporary cultural circles, beauty issubordinated to grand statements, elaborate concepts, social context, critical theory or technological functionality. We think it might be time to reacquaintourselves with it. Collective, digital, disembodied or embodied, abstract or figurative, connected or disconnected, what do digital artists consider beautiful?Do we even remember how to talk about it?

Elke Van Campenhout will be moderating a debate on transdisciplinary practicesaccording to the carousel principle. A slightly different question will be put to each of the participants, focusing on their personal positioning in the field oftransdisciplinary arts. How is their work situated between different disciplines? Where and how do they present their work to the outside world? What does itmean for an artist/programmer/policy maker to wade through the troubled waters of the in-between?

May 25, 2006 3pm>7pm
Theme: a focus on media art in Eastern and Central Europe

The ‘media art in Central/East Europe’ round table discussion is dedicated to thehistory and specific complexities of media art in the region, recounted through the personal narratives of the presenters. The individual contributions by theinternational round table participants will chart the archeology and architecture of media art in the region.

“Networks consist of mobile relations whose arrangement at any particular time isshaped by the 'constitutive outside' of feedback or noise. The order of networks is made up of a continuum of relations governed by interests, passions, affects andpragmatic necessities of different actors. [....] Organised networks are ‘clouds’ of social relationships in which disengagement is pushed to the limit. Community isan idealistic construct and suggests bonding and harmony, which is often simply not there." [Geert Lovink / Ned Rossiter]

A look into the working of cultural communities, onsite and online. Does the wishfor networking and the implementation of collaborative methodologies (physical and virtual tools) initiate new concepts and new aesthetics?